I've tried a hands-free version as well that rotates in the direction you move the mouse but usually that means you're facing away from the things you're trying to shoot :/ My only other alternative I think is the accursed crosshair and keyboard for movement. Aargh!

Well, hmmmm, being completely new to the game, all I could figure out how control was move the ship using the mouse and fire with left button. But the ship always faced to the right and I always shot to the right. If that is the limitations, then I found it fairly easy to control. But I was trying to figure out how to turn the ship around unsuccessfully.

I vote for the accursed crosshair! Aim and shoot with mouse and use the cursor keys for movement - similar to Alien Flux.

The current control system got me totally confused. I was constantly shooting the void and trying to fiddle around with X and Y keys. And the rotation itself was way too fast.BTW: The tail of collected objects often covers the ship so you can't even see the direction you're targeting at.

Luke's suggestion sounds pretty good. But I would do it the other way 'round. Aim in the opposite direction you are moving. Press the mouse = fire + direction lock.

If you are at the screen boarders you need to be able to fire towards the center, that would work by either using a dead zone (a border you cant enter) or by working with deltas instead of absolute coords.

I would also turn the smoothing (speed cap) almost off. Heh it's a mouse if you want it slow just move it slow

This way it should be rather twitchy.

Oh and for the relative stuff... since you can be directly at the screen edges you need to mark the spots were enemys appear (small flashing arrow) or just blast em into the screen in places were you currently not are. But it's nicer with random spawns imo, because it forces the player to move more - thus the perceived action is a bit stronger.

You could also use two different arrows. Simple '>' alike thingies for slow appearing enemyies and bigger flashing (beep beep) warning arrows for enemy formations wich bust in with high speed.

<played again>

Hmm... right now they spawn somewhere in the middle - effectively forcing you to the borders. That feels a bit restricting and is also kinda anti 360°.

The spread of the bubbles make it also hard to adjust the aiming direction. Those "bullets" are used as primary feedback for the direction you're aiming at, therefore it should be a bit clearer (straight ahead).

Oh and if you want to know how good your controls are, make it one hit = dead. Then you'll see. Btw having a energy bar in a shoot'em up, jump'n'shoot or jump'n'run is a two edged sword and in general it's more on the bad side. In the design phase you won't necessarly notice unfair things, suspense is softened, the amount of important decisions per minute is highly decreased and players with some experience will say things like "Oh an energy bar - i'm sure the controls suck." the first time they see a screenshot. Well, most won't say that but their intuition would tell 'em something like that.

New version now up has "locking" and directional control. Use shift, RMB, or caps lock to lock the direction you are facing in. Just move the mouse to move now. Z and X are still enabled for comparison.

Please take no notice of the start level. A very small percentage of levels are going to have a swarm of aliens spawning in the middle and following you like that. "Fruitini!!!" (4,5) is what most of the levels will be like.

I have adjusted the speed of the mouse tracking; it's much more responsive now.

What do you think of Fruitini, Angry Pumpkin, Strawberry Fields, Swarms of Twitchy Pods and Once Twice Thrice?

You'll only prefer aiming in the opposite direction on the few levels where you need to actually run away from aliens chasing you and shoot them at the same time. Most of the levels aren't going to be like that! The red spikes/bubble level is just a test.

The sensitivity problem is... a bug in the timing code! It's completely getting the timing wrong and running at like 200fps! Don't know why yet :/ Works on my XP boxen, Nvidia and ATI, dual and single processors.

I have similar massive slowdown problems with the latest cosmic trip (c.f. my post in that thread), with less than 1 FPS on the menu screen.

It may be there's something funny with latest versions of LWJGL. However, right now I'm more for blaming linux for having screwed itself up (this is the machine I was trying to rebuild, and have only partly got there). I will let you (and Kev and etc) know if I still have problems post-reformat-and-install.

Heh, it's created a C:\WINDOWS\Hallucinogenesis directory on my Win98 box. But there are no files in there.

Quote

RMB locks your ship's direction. Not the easiest thing in the world to use. Shift might be easier.

I have to say that that's a control system that sounds bloody awful on paper, but in practice works really, really well! But I hope you realise that it makes (for instance) the red sparkle levels essentially trivial?

Determines to the best of the platform's ability whether monitor vysnc is enabled on this window. The failsafe assumption is that when vsync cannot be determined, this method returns false, and you should rely on using a hires timer to throttle your framerate rather than relying on monitor sync (even if monitor sync is actually working). Therefore you can guarantee that if we return true from this method that we're pretty certain vsync is enabled.

...pretty certain

Well, good to know that there are drivers wich can dodge it. Ok then just use capping around your loop in any case and aim for hz+1 fps. This way you shouldn't miss any blank signal and it will run with the desired speed (ok a fart faster )

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